Latest updates out of Mexico City as work continues to find survivors of Tuesday's earthquake. (All times EST)

5 a.m. Thursday

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Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera says a total of 115 people have died in the capital following the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that shook the capital and nearby states.

That would bring the nationwide death toll to 245, based on an earlier federal government report counting 100 deaths in the capital and putting the overall number of confirmed deaths at 230.

Mexico City has suffered the highest death toll. But Mancera also said that two women and a man had been rescued alive from a collapsed office building late Wednesday, almost 36 hours after Tuesday’s midday quake.

2:10 p.m.

The Mexico City government says 52 people have been rescued from the rubble of collapsed buildings in the capital following Tuesday’s powerful earthquake.

The city’s Social Development Department tweeted the number Wednesday afternoon and added: “We won’t stop.”

The quake has killed at least 225 people in several states, and rescue efforts are continuing furiously, including at a primary and secondary school where 25 bodies have been found and a young girl was located alive amid the rubble.

Workers have been trying to extricate her for hours now.

2:00 p.m.

Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto says “every minute counts to save lives” of people under the rubble of buildings toppled by yesterday’s powerful earthquake.

Pena Nieto says the country’s highest priority is rescuing people in downed structures and treating the wounded. Earlier Wednesday he declared three days of national mourning in honor of the victims. At least 225 people died in the quake.

12:00 p.m.

The government of Panama says one of its citizens is among those killed by Mexico’s deadly earthquake.

The Foreign Ministry reports that a 55-year-old Panamanian woman who resided in Mexico City for the last 10 years died in a building that collapsed. A group of 35 Panamanian workers from the Red Cross, National Civil Defense and security agencies left Wednesday for Mexico to help with rescue efforts.

11:00 a.m.

Emergency crews have found 21 children and four adults dead in the rubble of an elementary school that collapsed during the earthquake in Mexico City, Luis Felipe Puente, the national coordinator of civil protection of the Ministry of the Interior, said in a tweet Wednesday.

10:00 a.m.

Rescuers said Wednesday they have found a surviving child in the ruins of a school that collapsed in Mexico’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake, one of many efforts across the city to save people trapped in under schools, homes and businesses toppled by a quake that killed at least 225 people.

Helmeted workers worked at the debris, sometimes calling for silence, as they tried to reach the girl at the Enrique Rebsamen school in southern Mexico City.

Foro TV reported that rescuers spotted the child and shouted to her to move her hand if she could hear them, and she did. A search dog subsequently entered the wreckage and confirmed she was alive.

Original Story:

Police, firefighters and ordinary Mexicans dug frantically through the rubble of collapsed schools, homes and apartment buildings early Wednesday, looking for survivors of Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in decades as the number of confirmed fatalities stood at 225.

AP Photo/Pablo Ramos

A man is rescued from a collapsed building in the Condesa neighborhood after an earthquake struck Mexico City, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017.

Adding poignancy and a touch of the surreal, Tuesday’s magnitude-7.1 quake struck on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands. Just hours earlier, people around Mexico had held earthquake drills to mark the date.

Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle

One of the most desperate rescue efforts was at a primary and secondary school in southern Mexico City, where a wing of the three-story building collapsed into a massive pancake of concrete slabs. Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble, covered in sheets.

Volunteer rescue worker Dr. Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble that had been Escuela Enrique Rebsamen. He made it into a classroom, but found all of its occupants dead.

“We saw some chairs and wooden tables. The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move rubble and we found a girl and two adults — a woman and a man,” he said.

“We can hear small noises, but we don’t know if they’re coming from above or below, from the walls above (crumbling), or someone below calling for help.”

A mix of neighborhood volunteers, police and firefighters used trained dogs and their bare hands to search through the school’s rubble. The crowd of anxious parents outside the gates shared reports that two families had received WhatsApp messages from girls trapped inside, but that could not be confirmed.

Rescuers brought in wooden beams to shore up the fallen concrete slabs so they wouldn’t collapse further and crush whatever airspaces remained.

The federal Education Department reported late Tuesday that 25 bodies had been recovered from the school’s wreckage, all but four of them children. It was not clear whether those deaths were included in the overall death toll of 217 reported by the federal civil defense agency. Pena Nieto had earlier reported 22 bodies found and said 30 children and eight adults were reported missing.

President Donald Trump tweeted support for Mexico City saying, "God bless the people of Mexico City. We are with you and will be there for you."

God bless the people of Mexico City. We are with you and will be there for you.

In a video message released late Tuesday, Pena Nieto urged people to be calm and said authorities were moving to provide help as 40 percent of Mexico City and 60 percent of nearby Morelos state were without power. But, he said, “the priority at this moment is to keep rescuing people who are still trapped and to give medical attention to the injured people.”

People across central Mexico already had rallied to help their neighbors as dozens of buildings tumbled into mounds of broken concrete. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said buildings fell at 44 sites in the capital alone as high-rises across the city swayed and twisted and hundreds of thousands of panicked people ran into the streets.

Long lines of volunteers passed chunks of debris from hand to hand at a collapsed clothing factory where several people died. When a person was hauled out alive, they broke into shouts of “Yes, we can!”

Dust-covered and exhausted from digging, 30-year-old Carlos Mendoza said two people were pulled alive from the ruins of a collapsed apartment building in the Roma Sur neighborhood during a three-hour period.

“When we saw this, we came to help,” he said, gesturing at the destruction. “This is ugly, very ugly.”

Blocks away, Alma Gonzalez was in her fourth-floor apartment when the quake collapsed the ground floor of her building, leaving her no way out. She was terrified until her neighbors mounted a ladder on their roof and helped her slide out a side window.

The official Twitter feed of civil defense agency head Luis Felipe Puente said 86 dead had been counted in Mexico City and 71 in Morelos state, which is just south of the capital. It said 43 were known dead in Puebla state, where the quake was centered. Twelve deaths were listed in the State of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City on three sides, four in Guerrero state and one in Oaxaca.

At the site of a collapsed apartment building in Mexico City, rescuers worked atop a three-story pile of rubble, forming a human chain that passed pieces of rubble across four city blocks to a site where they were dumped.

Throughout the day, rescuers pulled dust-covered people, some barely conscious, some seriously injured, from about three dozen collapsed buildings. At one site, shopping carts commandeered from a nearby supermarket were used to carry water to the rescue site and take rubble away.

As night fell, huge flood lights lit up the recovery sites, but workers and volunteers begged for headlamps.

Where a six-story office building collapsed in Mexico City, sisters Cristina and Victoria Lopez Torres formed part of a human chain passing bottled water.